Paul Morris·

Man In Ohio Claims Apple’s iPhone XS Max Exploded In His Pocket

A Columbus, Ohio resident has catapulted further scorn in Apple’s direction with claims that his 4-week-old iPhone XS Max caught fire in his pocket and ultimately exploded.

Apple is aware of the incident but it appears that the owner is looking to pursue legal action against the company.

The incident occurred on December 12 when Josh Hillard had the brand new iPhone XS Max lodged what he believed to be safely in his pocket. After noticing a rather peculiar smell and then a “large amount of heat” coming from his rear trouser pocket, Hillard could only deduce that all was not well with the Apple smartphone. After quickly removing iPhone XS Max from his pocket, it was obvious what had happened but the drama continued as Hillard allegedly ingested smoke from the resulting fire:

From the time of first noticing the fire and between removal of the pants and taking the phone out of my pocket and placing it outside, I inhaled A LOT of smoke.

Sadly for Hillard, it seems that the end of the drama did not end with an on-fire iPhone XS Max, smoke inhalation, and damaged trousers as a visit to the Apple Store only compounded his dissatisfaction with the entire situation. The Columbus resident has suggested to iDropNews that he was left waiting for approximately 40-minutes while Apple’s safety team looked at the device, had almost zero engagement from staff in the Apple Store, and was ultimately told that they could do nothing for him other than keep the damaged device and issue a replacement. No offer regarding the damaged clothing was made.

To the best of our knowledge, there has been no external verification process performed on the device to see if the story can be corroborated but it seems that Hillard has kept possession of the damaged device in order to see what his next steps are. This is the first reported incident of an exploding iPhone since one of Apple’s iPhone X units gave up the will to live when it was upgraded to iOS 12.1 in November. Let’s hope that Apple and the customer can come to a satisfactory ending on this one that hopefully will include a new pair of trousers.

(source: iDropNews)

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